


Process

by narsus



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-28
Updated: 2010-10-28
Packaged: 2017-10-12 22:42:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/129920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narsus/pseuds/narsus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The beginning and end of James Moriarty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Process

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Sherlock belongs to the BBC, Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat and obviously in the genesis of it all to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

People always look for the beginning. Like to put their finger on the place where it started: the place where it all went wrong. It makes them predictable. Everybody, _everybody_ , likes to have a reason. A method to the madness, a moment, an incident that explains it all. The moment Jim Moriarty went wrong. Was it bullying at school? The lack of forthcoming promotions at work? Being snubbed by a pretty, curly haired, boy in a lab? Maybe it was his boyfriend turning away with a look of disgust? Maybe it was one manager too many taking all the credit? Maybe it was schoolboys calling him short? People like specifics, notions of right and wrong, of the path that they ought not to take. It's so much easier after all, if you know what you shouldn't do, to end up like that yourself. Don't grow up indistinguishable from the other boys, don't rise quickly in the ranks within a career, don't taunt the world's only consulting detective. Don't do any of those things and you'll be safe, safer, safe...ish. Maybe you won't be safe at all, maybe you'll take the wrong turning too, and maybe there's nothing you can do about it.

I don't have a beginning, not in literary terms at any rate. I don't start and end with a case, with a dead body dressed in a garish shade of pink. I don't exist for the chase, for the game. Maybe I don't even exist at all. What did Descartes say? Cogito ergo sum. Maybe I'm the sum of a thought, my thoughts or perhaps someone else's. I think, well, sometimes. It doesn't help me exist. Thinking doesn't help anything other than business. I think, therefore, I... kill? I like that. It's a nice idea, as if ideas have any real currency. I'm not the sum of my thoughts anyway, nor, despite his delusions to the contrary, the sum of anyone else's. I am not bored, I never was. I despise that he thinks that way. Bored? As if the world exists for his entertainment. I don't have his ego: the world never existed just for me. Though perhaps it could be argued, by the pedantic, that the world exists in spite of me. As if I had that much influence. I couldn't exist in a world without people. I need people. Without them there'd be no business, criminal or IT.

Perhaps I can blame IT for all of it, perhaps I can blame the bitter joys of Microsoft certification. I do have genuine qualifications of course. MCSA, MCSE, CCNA, MCITP and of course the retroactively tedious A+. I can do the whole IT thing of course. I'm a qualified Cisco engineer: I'm one of the big boys, the ones who control the web. I can take down networks and rebuild them in a matter of hours. I can take a machine apart and rebuild it in minutes. I've done first line, second, third and yes, the mysterious, never official, fourth. I've even signed the Official Secrets Act. Anything you can do, _darling_ , I can do better, and I have the expensive certifications to prove it. So I could say, if I wanted a scapegoat, that IT made me do it, that technological expertise made me bitter. I lost hair while I was a phone monkey after all. I stole laptops while showing directors how to use VPN. I've rebooted servers while lying in bed. The biggest threat to this country isn't cyber terrorism: it's idiots with machines. Monkeys with typewriters have become end users with Home Edition.

But I'm being duplicitous. Is that even a word? If it is a word he's more likely to use than I am. My darling detective with his lazy diction and vanishing smile. IT didn't make me... whatever it is that I am. It didn't make me a monster, a nutcase, a... criminal consultant. 'Consulting criminal' sounds daft. I'd like to be 'the Napoleon of crime', something high blown and overdone like that. I'd like to be... I don't really know anymore. But I'm sure I'd like it. Which isn't the point. The point was never, is never, _him_. I am not talking about his hazy eyes or his expressive mouth. I'm not here to consider his long-fingered hands or slender thighs. It's not the sort of thing that I need to think about. Those things are just there: I can just look. They don't require hexadecimal conversion equations or multi-word switches typed without spacing. He doesn't require much really. There's not yet all that much to analyse. He does react but not like other people would. He reasons and solves and focuses, and none of those messy human emotions get in the way. I wonder how his boyfriend copes with that? But then he's been in a war: maybe he thinks that's normal behaviour now.

None of which is to the point. Knowledge didn't make me bitter, didn't make my heart hard. Knowledge did nothing but educate. It gave me tools for understanding the world, conducting diagnostics, putting things right. Ah. It's the last part that, of course, always went wrong. I _can't_ put things right, I never could, not for myself. I couldn't _fix_ anything but I could see, always, where it had gone wrong. I am, if you've ever watched _Lie to Me_ , a 'natural'. I can read people just as easily as dear Sherlock reads his texts. He doesn't read them like I do: he analyses, he watches, observes. He taught himself how to read the indicators of humanity and he doesn't feel them at all. He doesn't react, he never _cares_. It's all a game, a distraction, a play performed for his amusement. He never feels. I feel everything.

There's a line from something, a musical or perhaps a popular horror novel, about feeling. Maybe it's even a film adaptation. A character says, in a low, passionate voice, that he feels too much. Or perhaps he says it sorrowfully, full of self-loathing. I can't remember but I think it involved Brad Pitt. That's not the point: the point is that I feel, I hurt, I ache. I feel entirely too much. The little strikes turn into little wounds, turn into little scars and the scars build up. Over the years the little scars become a lump of scar tissue. The lump grows until it covers most of the heart, until it's too much, until that last, unscarred, part reacts, reaches out, screams 'no more'! When there's nothing left to give, nothing left to hate, then everything changes. The thought that it wouldn't make a difference if I was knocked over by a bus on the way home on a dark night becomes the mantra of rage. The fear passes away, the apathy melts into despair, and, eventually, the despair becomes fury. What was once "I hurt" becomes "I will hurt", what was once "I suffer" becomes "I will cause suffering", what was once "I have lost everything" becomes "I will take everything from you".

There was no single event. There was no beginning. There was only living, existing. There were only the tiny scars, the small bruises, the little knocks that built up over time. There was no single moment in which to yell "Eureka!" There was a moment, but it wasn't the beginning. There was an incident, but I don't remember it, it was insignificant, it was only one of many. But everything accumulates. The errors propagate and eventually the disk spins out of place. Eventually the death knell knocking becomes impossible to ignore and everything grinds to a stop. I did. I stopped: I didn't start. Pain turned into loathing and eventually loathing turned outwards into rage. Then I wanted to make everyone suffer. I wanted to snatch from them their victories, their triumphant. I wanted to turn all their aspirations and sacrifices to dust. I wanted to make them bleed. And I did, because people are... people. Driven by desire, by selfishness, by greed and callousness.

It's easy really. They come to me and I provide a solution. I analyse the problem and then I implement a little creative thinking to solve it. Microsoft should give me a certificate for that too. Novel solutions for analytical problems. Maybe I can fix something after all. But it's not a fix, really. It's a mess, a breakdown, a plaster over the crack in a dam, because it's not going to get any better, it's just going to get worse. Ignoring a problem won't fix it, won't put it right. I don't fix anything, I show them how to ignore it, how to 'fix' the one, stupid, thing they fixate on, and ignore all the rest. Everything breaks and all I do is speed the process along. I spin that magnetised platter just a little bit faster and the cycles per life wear down. I skip over the errors and leave them with a crippling breakdown of data. They don't break when I touch them but they will eventually, faster, easier, than they would have done before. I don't fix anything: I break it all down. I thought I could break everything.

I know it won't help. I know it won't make anything better. I know that but I when I move, when I destroy, when I dream in architectures of ruin, I can feel again without flinching. The rage burns away the pain, the puzzle distracts from it all. I don't have to feel. I don't have to hate or suffer. The pain is a dull ache otherwise and I don't very much like that. When I'm burning I'm not suffering, when I'm destroying. Eventually I should run out of things to destroy but that isn't likely. People don't like each other very much so I'll never run out of novel solutions to apply. I'll die before I run out of ways to hide my scars. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow I'll be knocked over by a bus on the way home on a dark night and it will all end. I'd like that, it has a certain, pedestrian, finality to it. No motive, no reason and no wickedly complicated, detectable, solution. Senseless is as senseless does.

If I die tomorrow my scarred heart will just stop beating. Everything will be over and nobody will even notice the scars. Not even him. They will be so small, so insignificant, that nobody will care. Life's not fair. Nobody will give a damn because those scars are there, on everybody, and its nobody else's problem that I... couldn't cope, snapped, broke. Correction: those scars are there for everybody but him. _He_ doesn't feel. He mimics it, parodies it, laughs at it. What he does feel is negligible: It's like a surface tremor that doesn't break the surface of water. He sees, observes, analyses. He doesn't feel too much of anything at all. I can't hurt a brain without a heart. I don't know how to damage the mind. I don't know how to break a thinking machine, a replicant, a robot with a human face. A cymek, if you believe the new additions. I can't make him feel: I can't stop feeling.

It's not a game in the end, not a dance. I'll lose: I'll die. Machines don't perish nearly as easily. He'll win but he won't call it a victory. It won't be Pyrrhic because that would mean he'd have to have sacrificed something of value and there's nothing he values so much as his precious logic. He won't lose, he'll win and deep down, somewhere in his machine brain, he'll flag up a one instead of a zero. But he won't feel a thing. By that point neither will I so perhaps I'll be able to call it a victory too. It's a win-win situation like that. He'll be... not bored for a while and I'll stop feeling, because I'm dead. They'll lay me down on a cold slab and there'll be peace, the perpetual peace of the grave. No more motion or action, no more entropy to breathe life into my cells. I'll just stop, I'll cease to be and the rest will be glorious, perfect, endless, silence. He will be my end and the desperate clanking of demagnetising plates and spring-loaded actuator grinding out of sync will stop.

In the end, he will be my salvation. A machine to stop a man: a perfectly twentieth century take on the hero slaying a monster. Except, in the medieval tales, I don't think the monster ever said thank you.

**Author's Note:**

> The conversation about feeling takes place between Louis and Armand in the film adaption of _Interview with the Vampire_.  
>  The Cymeks appear in Brian Herbert's prequel Dune novels.


End file.
